Chapter 59 Ordinary
Elias POV
Wednesday is grocery day.
This was not a decision either of us made. It is the kind of thing that happens between people who spend enough time together, routines forming without anyone naming them, the particular week taking on a shape that belongs to both of them equally without a negotiation ever taking place.
The first time we went to the shop together it was a Wednesday because that is when my afternoon is free. The second time was also a Wednesday. The third time Noah texted me mid-morning and said: grocery run later? and I said yes and then we were simply people who go to the shop together on Wednesdays, which is either deeply ordinary or quietly significant depending on the angle from which you look at it.
I think it is both.
I think both is the right answer for most things we have become to each other.
Noah pushes the trolley.
He does this with the focused efficiency of someone for whom grocery shopping is a task to be completed in the most direct possible route between the door and the checkout. He moves through aisles purposefully, list already memorized, hand already reaching. He is not browsing. He is executing.
I am the opposite and he knows this and has adapted to it with the patient acceptance of a man who has played team sport long enough to understand that different people move at different speeds and fighting it is less efficient than accounting for it.
I stop to read labels. I pick things up and put them back. I make small detours down aisles that were not on the route because something caught my attention.
He circles back. He waits. He does not comment.
I find this unreasonably endearing and I have decided never to tell him so.
The argument happens in the cereal aisle and it is entirely about cereal.
He puts something in the trolley. I pick it up and look at the nutritional panel with the expression of someone who already knows what they are going to say.
"This is essentially a biscuit," I say.
"It is cereal. I have eaten it since I was eight."
"That explains certain things about your relationship with sugar."
"It is cereal, Elias."
"It is a cereal-shaped biscuit. There is a meaningful distinction."
He takes it back from me and places it firmly back in the trolley. "It stays."
I reach to the shelf beside me. "Fine. Then these are coming."
He looks at what I am holding. His expression is the specific expression of a person who has been wronged by a food product.
"Those are rice cakes."
"They are a choice."
"A bad choice. They taste like compressed nothing."
"They taste like a person who has made a considered decision."
"A considered decision to eat cardboard."
"They are coming," I say, and I place them in the trolley with the calm finality of someone who has won.
He stares at the rice cakes for a moment. Then he pushes the trolley forward without further comment.
We both keep our items. No one wins. This is, I have learned, the correct outcome for arguments about cereal between two people who are each at least thirty percent stubborn.
He has a playlist he puts on when we cook.
I found out about this by accident the first time I was in his kitchen long enough for it to start. It surprised me. It is not what I would have expected from the outside version of him, the carefully composed captain. It is a mix that covers too much ground to have been made by someone trying to project anything, calm songs next to things that have no business being on the same list, the kind of playlist that gets made late at night when you are not curating yourself.
He told me once, when I asked, that he made it during the injury recovery. During the long hours of sitting still when the noise in his head needed somewhere to go that was not more thinking.
That is one of the most honest things I know about him.
Tonight we make pasta. This too has become a Wednesday thing without either of us deciding it. He makes the sauce because he is good at it, patient with it in a way he is not always patient with things that are not football. I handle the rest because I have more tolerance for the parts that require simultaneous attention.
The kitchen smells like garlic and tomato and the particular warmth of an enclosed space where something is being made. The playlist is doing its quiet work in the background. He talks about something the physio said at his session this afternoon. I tell him about a passage in the seminar reading that I have been thinking about since Monday and which turned out to mean something different the second time through.
We talk over each other occasionally. We sort it out without fuss. He reaches past me for the salt and says excuse me out of habit and I do not register it consciously until I am already stepping aside because this is the kind of language the body learns before the mind gets around to noting it.
He learned my kitchen movements.
I learned his.
At some point I stop talking mid-sentence and just stand at the counter and feel the shape of the evening around me. The warmth of the room. The smell of the food. The sound of him behind me, focused and unhurried, the playlist cycling to something slower.
He notices the pause. "You alright?"
"Yeah," I say. "Just thinking."
"About what?"
I turn around and look at him, standing at the stove with the wooden spoon, looking back at me with the open uncomplicated attention he has been giving me more of lately.
"This," I say. Which is not a full answer and he knows it but he also understands it, I can tell by the way his expression settles.
"Yeah," he says.
Then he turns back to the sauce and I turn back to what I was doing and the evening continues.
Just an evening.
Just a Wednesday.
Just this, which is enough and more than enough and something I plan to keep.